LoneWlf - Slashdot User

Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes 538

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 13, 2010 @07:57PM from the less-math-more-social-science dept.

artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"

Comment Re:Nice theory... (Score 1) 497

by LoneWlf on Friday December 04, 2009 @12:51PM (#30325252) Attached to: Hunting the Mythical "Bandwidth Hog"

Wizards first Rule?

Comment oh joy (Score 1) 170

by LoneWlf on Thursday November 05, 2009 @10:26AM (#29994480) Attached to: Man-In-the-Middle Vulnerability For SSL and TLS

More cyber terror :)

Submission + - Coders: Your Days Are Numbered (infoworld.com) 2

Submitted by

snydeq

on Friday April 03, 2009 @11:29AM

snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister argues that communication skills, not coding skills, are a developer's greatest asset in a bear economy. 'Too many software development teams are still staffed like secretarial pools. Ideas are generated at the top and then passed downward through general managers, product managers, technical leads, and team leads. Objectives are carved up into deliverables, which are parceled off to coders, often overseas,' McAllister writes. 'The idea that this structure can be sustainable, when the U.S. private sector shed three-quarters of a million jobs in March 2009 alone, is simple foolishness.' Instead, companies should emulate the open source model of development, shifting decision-making power to the few developers with the deepest architectural understanding of, and closest interaction with, the code. And this shift will require managers to look beyond résumés 'choked with acronyms and lists of technologies' to find those who 'can understand, influence, and guide development efforts, rather than simply taking dictation.'"

Submission + - New CyberSecurity Bill Raises Questions of Privacy

Submitted by Nicolas Dawson on Friday April 03, 2009 @10:46AM

Nicolas Dawson writes: Steve Aquino of MotherJones asks: "Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?"

A controversial new bill called The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would give the president, "...the ability to 'declare a cybersecurity emergency' and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any 'critical' information network 'in the interest of national security.' The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president."

Responses from several professional groups, including the EFF are included in the article.

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